On 8 okt 2010, at 02:45, Brian Birtles wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I wish to clarify the expected behaviour of animations that are
> dynamically removed and added from a document with regards to the
> events that are generated.
Brian,
I think you'll have to ask this in a more SVG-specific forum, at least: you'll be more likely to find people there who have an opinion on this for SVG, which seems to be your main interest.
For SMIL 2.0 we specifically allowed only very limited modification of the DOM tree (only adding begin times, really), because the semantics of modifying the live document on the fly are horrendous. At that time, we thought that a later incarnation of the SYMM group might tackle this, but so far that hasn't happened:-)
I'm personally rather interested in the subject of modifying active documents, and we've written a paper on preliminary work for Document Engineering this year, with the plan to work things out more thoroughly for next year. But so far the results are that allowing any random modification to an active document is probably out of the question, unless you're willing to recompute the whole timegraph, and even then describing the semantics of the changes will probably be (a) very difficult and (b) unexpected by end users. But the good news is that if you disallow some things (such as removing a node on which other nodes depend for their timing) it may be possible to come up with reasonable semantics. But, as said: the actual work still has to be done...
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman